Leagues Cup Quarterfinals: 4 Mexican Clubs, 0 Games in Mexico, 0 MLS Teams Left

Update, Thursday August 27 — the round is over, and it ended 4-0 to Liga MX. Toluca beat Austin FC 2-0 and América beat Columbus Crew 2-0 on Wednesday night, joining León and Monterrey. There is no MLS team left in this tournament. For the first time in Leagues Cup history, all four semifinalists are Liga MX clubs (Claro Sports, La Razón) — which means the September 6 final is guaranteed to be an all-Mexican final before a single semifinal has been played.

Update, Friday August 28 — the semifinals now have a date, a time and a venue. Both are on Wednesday, September 2, and neither is in Mexico: Toluca vs. León at Shell Energy Stadium in Houston (8:00 PM local) and Club América vs. Monterrey at Dignity Health Sports Park in Los Angeles (8:30 PM local) (Leagues Cup). This page previously said “September 1 and 2” with venues unpublished, because that was all the tournament had released. Third-place match and final: Sunday, September 6.

Here’s a fact you could check in about thirty seconds, and most people who followed this tournament didn’t notice until it was over: four Liga MX clubs made the Leagues Cup quarterfinals, not one of the four games was played in Mexico — and all four of them won anyway.

Illinois, Colorado, New Jersey, California. Four road games against MLS opposition, four wins. Below is how the round actually went, and then the part that matters if you’re running a pool: this round quietly broke a rule most prediction pools have written into them without thinking about it, and the semifinals are about to break it again.

The full quarterfinal results

Tuesday, August 25

Match	Result	Venue
Monterrey vs. Chicago Fire	2-1	SeatGeek Stadium, Bridgeview, IL
León vs. Real Salt Lake	3-0	DICK’S Sporting Goods Park, Commerce City, CO

Wednesday, August 26

Match	Result	Venue
Toluca vs. Austin FC	2-0	Sports Illustrated Stadium, Harrison, NJ
América vs. Columbus Crew	2-0	Dignity Health Sports Park, Carson, CA

Toluca’s win was decided by two red cards. Joseph Rosales was sent off in the 40th minute for a hard challenge and Ilie Sánchez followed in the 74th for a second yellow, leaving Austin with nine men. Helinho scored from the penalty spot on 53 minutes and Jorge Díaz added the second in stoppage time. The number that tells the story: Toluca finished with 66% possession, 26 shots and eight on target; Austin had none (El Imparcial, official match page).

América’s win turned on a save. With the score still 1-0, Rodolfo Cota saved a Brais Méndez penalty on 39 minutes. Raphael Veiga had opened the scoring on 11 minutes and Brian Rodríguez got the second (Club América, El Imparcial).

Two notes on precision, because we’d rather say this than pretend it isn’t true. We’re not giving you an exact minute for América’s second goal — the club’s own site says 51’, the press says first-half stoppage time, and they can’t both be right. Same for Toluca’s second, listed as 90+7’ in one place and 96’ in another. When two good sources disagree on a minute, we give you the phase of the game and move on. And in the other direction: some outlets reported Brian Rodríguez scoring both goals for América. Three sources, including the club, credit the first to Veiga.

It was two days, not three. Until the schedule dropped, the only thing announced was a window running August 25–27, and plenty of places printed it that way — we were one of them on our Spanish site, and we corrected it. There were no games on Thursday the 27th.

Four Mexican clubs, and not one home game

Look at that venue column again. Four Liga MX sides in the last eight, and every one of them travelled. León, América, Toluca and Monterrey played zero minutes of this round in Mexico — and won all four.

It’s worth being precise about what that does and doesn’t mean, because the shorthand that went around — that each Mexican club was simply visiting its opponent’s stadium — isn’t quite right either. Two of these grounds didn’t belong to either club in the tie. DICK’S Sporting Goods Park, where León played Real Salt Lake, is in Commerce City, Colorado; Real Salt Lake’s own ground is America First Field in Sandy, Utah, several hundred miles away.

So the honest summary is: the Mexican clubs were all away, some of the American clubs effectively were too, and the tidy home-and-away structure that most pools assume simply wasn’t there. And it still isn’t — the semifinal venues haven’t been announced, but with four Mexican clubs playing in the United States, no one is going to be home for those either.

For anyone watching, that’s trivia. For anyone running a prediction pool, it’s a rule problem that’s about to repeat.

None of these games can end in a draw

This is the rule most people filling in a Leagues Cup pool don’t know, and it matters more than the venues do: the tournament doesn’t allow draws. Any of them. Not in the group phase, not in the knockouts.

The official site puts it plainly — Leagues Cup uses a no-ties format to ensure a winner in every match, and if a game is level at the end of regulation it goes straight to a penalty shootout, with no extra time (Leagues Cup).

Read that twice, because the second half is the surprising bit. There is no extra time. It finishes 1-1 on 90 minutes and the shootout starts almost immediately. This is not a European knockout tie.

And here’s where it collides with your pool. Your pool almost certainly has a “draw” option. The tournament doesn’t. As it happens, none of the four quarterfinals needed a shootout — all four were settled inside 90 minutes. You got lucky. Two semifinals and a final still to come is three more chances not to be.

So when a semifinal finishes 1-1 and one team wins the shootout, does the person who picked “draw” score, or the person who picked the team that advanced?

The short version, if you want a default: score the 90-minute result. A draw is a draw even if somebody advances. It’s the only option that doesn’t force you to invent a new rule halfway through the tournament.

What this does to home advantage in your pool

A lot of pools have some version of home advantage baked in — and most of the people running them have never had to think about it, because in a normal domestic league one team is always home.

The three common versions:

• A tiebreaker. Level on points at the end? The tie goes to whoever picked more home wins, or some variant.
• A scoring weight. Correctly calling an away win is worth more than calling a home win, on the theory that it’s harder.
• An informal default. Nobody wrote it down, but when the group is split on a coin-flip game, everyone leans home.

All three of those quietly stop working here. Not because they’re wrong, but because there’s no home team to apply them to. If your pool’s rules say “away wins score double,” what’s an away win when both teams travelled? And in an all-Liga MX semifinal round played in the United States, that’s now true of every remaining game in the tournament.

This is the same category of problem as a match decided on penalties — a situation the rules didn’t anticipate, which is fine right up until it decides who wins, and then it’s an argument. The fix is the same too, and it’s boring: decide before the games, not after.

Three defensible ways to handle it, pick one and write it down:

1. Suspend the home rule for the rest of the tournament. Cleanest option. Everything scores flat, no weighting, no home tiebreaker. Say so out loud before September 2.
2. Use the bracket seeding instead. The competition designates a higher seed for each tie. If you want a “home” side on paper, use seeding and say that’s what you’re doing.
3. Keep the rule and accept it does nothing. Also fine, as long as everyone knows. The problem isn’t the rule; the problem is finding out about it on September 6.

The one option that isn’t defensible is leaving it unwritten and sorting it out afterward. That’s how a group of friends ends a tournament not speaking to each other.

Frequently asked questions

Who won the Leagues Cup 2026 quarterfinals?

All four Liga MX clubs. Monterrey beat Chicago Fire 2-1 and León beat Real Salt Lake 3-0 on August 25; Toluca beat Austin FC 2-0 and América beat Columbus Crew 2-0 on August 26.

Are there any MLS teams left in the Leagues Cup 2026?

No. All four semifinalists — León, Toluca, Monterrey and América — are Liga MX clubs. It’s the first time that has happened in the tournament’s history.

What are the Leagues Cup 2026 semifinals?

Toluca vs. León and Club América vs. Monterrey, both on Wednesday, September 2 — in Houston (Shell Energy Stadium, 8:00 PM local) and Los Angeles (Dignity Health Sports Park, 8:30 PM local). The third-place match and the final are on September 6.

Where were the Leagues Cup quarterfinals played?

All four in the United States: Bridgeview (Illinois), Commerce City (Colorado), Harrison (New Jersey) and Carson (California). None in Mexico, despite four Mexican clubs having qualified.

Which Liga MX teams reached the Leagues Cup quarterfinals?

León, América, Toluca and Monterrey. Cruz Azul missed out on the fourth-level tiebreaker — goals scored — by a single goal.

What happens if a Leagues Cup match is tied after 90 minutes?

It goes straight to penalties — there is no extra time. Leagues Cup uses a no-ties format so that every match produces a winner (Leagues Cup). For your pool, that means deciding in advance whether you score the 90-minute result or the team that advanced. See how to count a match decided on penalties.

Set your pool up before September 2

Four teams, two semifinals on the same night, a third-place match and a final — all inside a week, and all of them guaranteed to be Liga MX vs. Liga MX. It’s an ideal short-format pool: every game matters and it’s over in five days.

Three things to write down before the first kickoff: your tiebreaker, what you’re doing about home advantage when nobody is home, and what a shootout is worth — because with no extra time and no draws, any of the remaining games can end that way.

With Quini you set it up in a couple of minutes, share it with a link, and the scoreboard updates itself as the goals go in. You write the rules — including how scoring works — and we keep the score.

Get Quini at playquini.com and set your pool up before the semifinals on September 2.